'She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.' The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'
'Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.
'The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.
'With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid's Tale and Lord of the Flies, The Natural Way of Things is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood's position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.' (Publication summary)
The Natural Way of Things
Australia
:
2017
9270594
2017
single work
film/TV
Planned as a micro-budget feature film adaptation, the film is the work of independent producers Katia Nizic and Emma Dockery.
Unit Suitable For
AC: Senior Secondary Literature (Unit 4)
Themes
dystopia, feminism, gender, gender roles and stereotypes, human rights, misogyny, nature, patriarchy, power and authority, social control, stereotypes, Sustainability, the environment
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
At Home with Charlotte Wood
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23444599
2021
single work
interview
podcast
'Charlotte Wood is the award-winning and acclaimed author of six novels, a collection of interviews and a book about cooking. She has won the Stella Prize, the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Indie Book of the Year, and most recently the ABIA for Literary Fiction.
'This interview explores her 2021 work of non-fiction, The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life. Charlotte has appeared on The Garret before, once exploring her most famous work, The Natural Way of Things, and again discussing her novel, The Weekend.' (Production summary)
'Since the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the form and function of animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these fictive challenges, turning to a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). I argue that Wood’s novel operates as a taxonomic replication of some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals. At first blush, the work’s satire of the romanticisation of animal imagery and its exposure of modernity’s entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism are a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. Yet, the novel also deploys a symbology where animals diversely signify the female inmates and conversely pathways to freedom, a symbology that reduces the animal to a referent.'
Source: Abstract
'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.'
Source: Abstract.
